Research Information System
Mimarlıkta Sayısal Tasarım XV. Ulusal Sempozyumu, İstanbul, Turkey, 28 - 29 June 2021, pp.147-158
Robot-aided architectural design is becoming important, yet mostly goes through industrial robots. Adapting an existing vehicle to
design and production processes is highly complex, and architects have difficulty in using and understanding the tool. This difficulty
leads to a gap between intended outcomes and what the robot can actually give. Still, it is possible to look at robotic production
from a different view via a swarm robot (SR). There are potentials of SR in emergent situations, yet these potentials have not been
fully discovered in architecture due to the requirement of interdisciplinary studies in designing and developing SR. Hence, SR’
application areas remain limited in design, fabrication, and construction because of the complexity for architects in understanding
how they can be used in design processes effectively. Designers can discover their potentials and provide solutions for challenges
only if they understand how these complex robots work and interact. In this way, they can be used more efficiently in design
processes. There are studies that focus on the working principles of SR through categorization. This study differs from the existing
ones due to the discussion on emergence in design and fabrication processes in architecture. SR offers advantages in emergence
in design, fabrication, and construction. Within this context, this paper proposes designers a framework of swarm bots in terms of
their technical features and discusses the potentials and challenges of SRS. The aim is not to enlist all examples nor their alltechnical features. Instead, this paper outlines prominent features concerning the technical necessities of an algorithm scheme in
regards to using case scenarios. Technical necessities are associated with working and movement principles of SR. This framework
is the main contribution of this study, as it offers an original and valuable contribution to the field by questioning the benefits of
using robots in a swarm mentality. As swarm studies generally relate to different conceptual layers, the authors here take
emergence as a driving force of the examination.